A Disability History of the United States (29 page)

17.
Alfred W. Crosby, “Ecological Imperialism: The Overseas Migration of Western Europeans as a Biological Phenomenon,” in
American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal: 1500–1850
, ed. Peter Mancall and James H. Merrell (New York: Routledge, 2000), 62.

18.
David W. Galenson,
Traders, Planters, and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 112–13.

19.
Hugh Thomas,
The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440–1870
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 376, 378.

20.
Ibid., 386.

21.
Ibid., 311.

22.
Foreign Slave Trade: Abstract of the Information Recently Laid on the Table of the House of Commons on the Subject of the Slave Trade
(London, 1821): 84–85.

23.
George Francis Dow,
Slave Ships and Slaving
(1927; repr. New York: Dover, 1970), xxxv.

24.
John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Slave Ships,” 1834.

25.
Galenson,
Traders, Planters, and Slaves,
76–80; Thomas,
The Slave Trade,
438–39.

26.
James Oliver Horton and Louise E. Horton,
In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 12; Darold D. Wax, “Preferences for Slaves in Colonial America,”
Journal of Negro History
58, no. 4 (October 1973): 382.

1.
David J. Rothman,
Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1971).

2.
Dawn Keetley and John Pettegrew, eds.,
Public Women, Public Words: A Documentary History of American Feminism,
vol. 1 (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1997), 48.

3.
Douglas Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in
The New Disability History: American Perspectives,
ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 43–44.

4.
Daniel Blackie, “Disabled Revolutionary War Veterans and the Construction of Disability in the Early United States, c. 1776–1840” (PhD diss., University of Helsinki, 2010), 1–2, 36.

5.
Ibid., 42, 49, 56; James E. Potter, “‘He . . . regretted having to die that way’: Firearms Accidents in the Frontier Army, 1806–1891,”
Nebraska History
78, no. 4 (1997): 175–86.

6.
Blackie, “Disabled Revolutionary War Veterans,” 60–61.

7.
Ibid., 69–71.

8.
Ibid., chapter 4.

9.
Ruth Wallis Herndon,
Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 170–73.

10.
For a smart and extended analysis of this, see Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality,” 33–57.

11.
Thomas Jefferson,
Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia; With the Appendixes—Complete
(Baltimore, MD: printed by W. Pechin, 1800), 143.

12.
Harriet A. Washington,
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
(New York: Doubleday, 2006), 35–36; Dea Boster, “Unfit for Bondage: Disability and African American Slavery in the United States, 1800–1860” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2010). While limited scholarship exists on slavery and disability, Boster’s dissertation is a marvelous beginning and sets a high bar for future scholarship.

13.
Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality,” 39–40.

14.
Boster, “Unfit for Bondage,” 70, 75–76.

15.
Ibid., 86, 90, 101.

16.
Ibid., 56–57; Olive Gilbert and Sojourner Truth,
Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York in 1828
(Boston: privately printed, 1850), 39;
Norfolk (VA) Herald,
October 25, 1798, accessed via “The Geography of Slavery in Virginia,” Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia,
www.virginia.edu
.

17.
Virginia Gazette,
August 11, 1774, accessed via “The Geography of Slavery,” Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia,
www.virginia.edu
.

18.
Boster, “Unfit for Bondage,” 56–57.

19.
For a strong analysis of soundness, see Sharla M. Fett,
Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), chapter 1; Fett,
Working Cures,
23; Boster, “Unfit for Bondage,” 92–93.

20.
Dea H. Boster, “An ‘Epeleptick’ Bondswoman: Fits, Slavery, and Power in the Antebellum South,”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
83, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 271–301; Ellen Samuels, “‘A Complication of Complaints’: Untangling Disability, Race, and Gender in William and Ellen Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom,”
MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States
31, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 15–47. Samuel’s marvelous essay chronicles not an instance of malingering, but a case in which William and Ellen Craft used disability as a ploy in order to escape from slavery.

21.
Boster, “Unfit for Bondage,” 111, 122.

22.
Marie Jenkins Schwartz,
Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 212–14; Ellen Samuels, “Examining Millie and Christine McKoy: Where Enslavement and Enfreakment Meet,”
Signs
37, no. 1 (Autumn 2011): 53–81.

23.
Washington,
Medical Apartheid,
61–67.

24.
Kirby Ann Randolph, “Central Lunatic Asylum for the Colored Insane: A History of African Americans with Mental Disabilities, 1844–1885” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2003); Frederick Douglass,
Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself
(1892), electronic edition available at “Documenting the American South,” University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,
http://docsouth.unc.edu
, 137–38; Frederick Douglass,
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 56.

25.
Gerald Grob, “Edward Jarvis and the Federal Census,”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
50, no. 1 (1976): 4–27; Albert Deutsch, “The First US Census of the Insane (1840) and Its Uses as Pro-Slavery Propaganda,”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
15 (1944): 469–82; Patricia Cline Cohen,
A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), chapter 6. I’m using Cohen’s statistics.

26.
“Reflections on the Census of 1840,”
Southern Literary Messenger
(Richmond, VA) 9 (1843): 345, 350.

27.
Grob, “Edward Jarvis”; Deutsch, “The First US Census of the Insane”; Cohen,
A Calculating People.

28.
Alfred W. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,”
William and Mary Quarterly
33 (1976): 290–91.

29.
Edward D. Castillo, “Blood Came from their Mouths: Tongva and Chumash Responses to the Pandemic of 1801,” in
Medicine Ways: Disease, Health, and Survival among Native Americans,
ed. Clifford E. Trafzer and Diane Weiner (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2001): 16–31.

30.
Helpful in my formulation of this argument was Philip M. Ferguson,
Abandoned to Their Fate: Social Policy and Practice toward Severely Retarded People in America, 1820–1920
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994).

31.
Lois Bragg, ed.,
Deaf World: A Historical Reader and Primary Sourcebook
(New York: New York University Press, 2001), 6; Harlan Lane,
A Deaf Artist in Early America: The Worlds of John Brewster Jr.
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2004); Harlan Lane,
When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf
(New York: Vintage Books, 1984).

32.
Samuel Gridley Howe,
On the Causes of Idiocy
(1848; New York: Arno Press, 1972), 1–2. For more on this trend, see: James W. Trent Jr.,
Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States
(Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); Ferguson,
Abandoned to Their Fate
; Peter L. Tyor and Leland V. Bell,
Caring for the Retarded in America: A History
(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984); Lawrence B. Goodheart, “Rethinking Mental Retardation: Education and Eugenics in Connecticut, 1818–1917,”
Journal of the History of Medicine & Allied Sciences
59, no. 1 (2004): 90–111.

33.
Ernest Freeberg,
The Education of Laura Bridgman
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Elisabeth Gitter,
The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the Original Deaf-Blind Girl
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001); Kim E. Nielsen, “The Southern Ties of Helen Keller,”
Journal of Southern History
73, no. 4 (November 2007): 783–806; Kim E. Nielsen,
The Radical Lives of Helen Keller
(New York: New York University Press, 2004); Kim E. Nielsen,
Beyond the Miracle Worker: The Remarkable Life of Anne Sullivan Macy and Her Extraordinary Friendship with Helen Keller
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2009); Harlan Lane,
A Deaf Artist in Early America: The Worlds of John Brewster Jr.
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2004); Phyllis Klein Valentine, “A Nineteenth-Century Experiment in Education of the Handicapped: The American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb,”
New England Quarterly
64, no. 3 (1991): 355–75; Hannah Joyner, “This Unnatural and Fratricidal Strife: A Family’s Negotiation of the Civil War, Deafness, and Independence,” in
The New Disability History
, ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 83–106; Hannah Joyner,
From Pity to Pride: Growing Up Deaf in the Old South
(Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2004).

34.
Mary Ann Jimenez,
Changing Faces of Madness: Early American Attitudes and Treatment of the Insane
(Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987), 81.

35.
Shawn Smallman, “Spirit Beings, Mental Illness, and Murder: Fur Traders and the Windigo in Canada’s Boreal Forest, 1774–1935,”
Ethnohistory
57, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 580.

36.
Jimenez,
Changing Faces of Madness,
103, and see examples 101–2.

37.
Ibid., 106–7; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Derangement in the Family: The Story of Mary Sewall, 1824–1825,”
Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings
15 (1990): 168–84.

38.
Dorothea L. Dix, “Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts, 1843,” in
The History of Mental Retardation: Collected Papers,
vol. 1, ed. Marvin Rosen, Gerald Clark, and Marvin Kivitz (Baltimore, MD: University Park Press, 1976), 17; Benjamin Reiss, “Letters from Asylumia: The
Opal
and the Cultural Work of the Lunatic Asylum, 1851–1860,”
American Literary History
16, no. 1 (2004): 1–28; Lawrence B. Goodheart, “The Concept of Insanity: Women Patients at the Hartford Retreat for the Insane, 1824–1865,”
Connecticut History
36, no. 1 (1995): 31–47; Gerald Grob, “Class, Ethnicity, and Race in American Mental Hospitals, 1830–1875,”
Journal of the History of Medicine & Allied Sciences
28, no. 3 (July 1973): 207–29; Peter MacCandless, “Curative Asylum, Custodial Hospital: The South Carolina Lunatic Asylum and the State Hospital, 1828–1920,” in
The Confinement of the Insane: International Perspectives, 1800–1965,
ed. Roy Porter and David Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 173–92; Lawrence B. Goodheart, “From Cure to Custodianship of the Insane Poor in Nineteenth-Century Connecticut,”
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
65 (2010): 106–30; Lawrence B. Goodheart,
Mad Yankees: The Hartford Retreat for the Insane
and Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); Shomer S. Zwelling,
Quest For a Cure: The Public Hospital In Williamsburg, Virginia, 1773–1885
(Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1985); Ellen Dwyer,
Homes for the Mad: Life inside Two Nineteenth-Century Asylums
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Nancy Tomes,
The Art of Asylum-Keeping: Thomas Story Kirkbride and the Origins of American Psychiatry
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); Benjamin Reiss,
Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Katherine K. Ziff, David O. Thomas, and Patricia M. Beamish, “Asylum and Community: The Athens Lunatic Asylum in Nineteenth-Century Ohio,”
History of Psychiatry
19 (2008): 409–32.

39.
Penny Richards, “‘Besides Her Sat Her Idiot Child’: Families and Development Disability in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” in
Mental Retardation in America: A Historical Reader,
ed. Steven Noll and James W. Trent Jr. (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 65–68.

40.
Samuel Gridley Howe, “Report Made to the Legislature of Massachusetts,” 1848.

41.
Richards, “‘Besides Her Sat Her Idiot Child,’” 65.

42.
Carl T. Steen, “The Home for the Insane, Deaf, Dumb, and Blind of the Cherokee Nation,”
Chronicles of Oklahoma
21 (1943): 402–19; Rev. W. A. Duncan, Works Progress Administration, Indian Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma, University of Oklahoma, Western History Collections,
http://libraries.ou.edu
, accessed August 5, 2011.